Comedian John Cleese spoke to 2UE’s Tim Webster about his career and the upcoming ACRAs. Cleese is coming to Australia next month as a keynote speaker at the Australian Commercial Radio Conference and Awards.
Cleese told Webster some comedians can meet a person with an unusual voice or manner, then take on their personality easily and turn it to comedy.
He admired the Goon Show’s Peter Sellers as someone who could do that: “I used to hear them when they first went out, and I was so obsesses by it, it helped to understand that mad enthusiasm for Python later on, because I was the same about the Goons. I used to listen to the original broadcast, and then two days later I’d lie on my bed with one ear at the radio, and a cushion over the other ear, trying to hear the side jokes that I’d missed because the audience was laughing so much.”
Cleese says he loves the medium of radio: “It is one of the reasons I’m pleased to do this conference… I love the medium so much, and the reason is because you get rid of all the technology. Nobody comes up and says ‘sorry, we had a shadow’ or, you know, ‘there was a bit of glint of light’ or ‘you’ve got a lot of sweat coming off you’ – it’s all about the script, the performance, and the audience sitting the other side of this mic. There’s nothing in your way… I love it.”
Cleese also enjoys doing voiceovers for animated films, like Shrek because “you go into a lovely comfortable studio, you don’t have to learn the lines and you don’t have to shave.”
Cleese began his comedy career on the radio and is looking forward to coming to Australia for the ACRAs next month:
“I was in a little show in Cambridge; my last term there, and we were very lucky, because somebody said this is a good little show and they put us into a small theatre in the West End. But the next thing was I was offered a job in radio, and I started in New Bond Street; BBC light entertainment, writing for Dick Emery… I had nearly a year of that, and I was tremendously happy, because they were nice people.
“They were kind of resenting this newcomer called television. I remember thinking that was an old-fashioned idea. It’s quite clear to me now television is going to completely crash because it is so awful everywhere, apart from HBO. So radio will come back into its own at last. Deservedly.”